Back in 2022, surrounded by colleagues who were infused with "open source scepticism", I wrote "Open Source in Enterprise Environments - Where Are We Now and What Is Our Way Forward?" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/opensource_enterprise_notes.html as an explainer.
Hopefully a useful thing for others too, with links therein #freesofware #opensource #enterprise #openbsd #freebsd #netbsd #linux
Since the original came out, I have made updates here and there, and added references to some newer material.
You could see "EU CRA: It's Later Than You Think, Time to Engineer Up!" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/eu_cra_its_later_than_you_think_time_to_engineer_up.html as a further development in response to the real world (or at least the EU parts) moving forward.
One important aspect /all/ people overlook, including you:
Aircraft carriers are /simple/ compared to software.
Building a modern air-craft carrier takes merely one million different stock-numbers.
/bin/bash is 200k lines
Last I looked SystemD was north of 1M
All of FreeBSD is 26 million lines.
Linux kernel alone is 36 million lines.
Ohh, and also this old rule of thumb:
"Well written code typically has one bug for every thousand lines."
Yeah, very funny.
(By that same metric the aircraft carrier is only made from around 90 parts too, and half of those only because there was no way to get rid of them.)
But the point here is not deconstructionism but complexity: How many individual items do you have to keep track of, and position just right, to complete your project.
Peter N. M. Hansteen
Poul-Henning Kamp
Henryk Plötz